These register as different pages though? We have rankings in SEOMoz Pro for terms where our homepage shows up 6th on google, but SEOMoz says it's not on the first page because it's checking against apprenda.com and not www.apprenda.com

Also, it seems like for some reason pages with trailing slashes also register differently than those without. Should we be doing something for that? Something to make sure all pages get rewritten to having the trailing slash or not?

3 Responses

You should utilize htaccess 301 permanent redirects to force trailing slashes and www. to your URLs (or vice versa). This way you will let Google and other search engines know the correct way to be displaying your URLs. Anything pointing to your domain that doesn't fit that will be redirected to the proper format. This, as well as utilizing canonical tags, should take care of your duplicate content issue.

I'm assuming you have an index.php for your website but modify this and test as needed.

# Rewrite all requests which do not resolve to existing files to the CMS script, except# for image, css, and JS file requests, none of which need to be handled by the CMS,# and requests for index.php itself (to avoid a wasteful second-pass exists check).RewriteCond $1 !(^index\.php|\.(gif|jpe?g|png|css|js))$RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Make sure you test this out before going live but it should work for what you need.

I don't have much experience with .NET but it looks like there are two ways to accomplish it. 1) Make changes to IIS to create the permanent redirect, 2) create server side code (maybe you have to check what URL is being requested and redirect them to the correct format?). You should be able to use REGEX like is displayed in my original post to accomplish this in .NET.

I would say the change directly in IIS, if you have access, is the way to go.